330647 - Thunderbird English version cannot support attachment whose name includes simplified Chinese characters well

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 309566

(Thunderbird :: Message Compose Window, defect)

Description

[FENG Can]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Build Identifier: 2600

Every time when I sent a mail with attachment whose name is in Chinese, my friend cannot read the name of the attachment with other E-mail softwares, even though they can open the file sometimes.  I use an English version Thunderbird and try to send a similar mail to myself. No problem occurs when I recieve the mail with Thunderbird but if I want to view the mail through website, I cannot read it.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Write an E-mail with attachment whose name includes Chinese characters.
2.Send the mail to yourself. Such as Gmail account.
3.Log in your mail box through website and recieve the mail.
4.Or recieve the mail with other softwares.

Actual Results:  
The file name appears in numbers or some characters we don't expect.

Expected Results:  
The file name should appear in Chinese and can be opened directly

My Windows XP is an English version and the Thunderbird is also in English. But I have to write Chinese mails sometimes.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

See bug 162361 -- a patch is in progress that should be in for TB 2.0.

Comment 2

[ling2.net]

(In reply to comment #1)
> See bug 162361 -- a patch is in progress that should be in for TB 2.0.
> 
I don't think this bug is the same as bug 162361.

I guess the reson why the filename turns out to be garbled at Mr. Feng's friends is that TB complies with RFC2231 while his friends' email clients don't. As RFC2231 stipulates how to handle non-ASCII characters in the attachment's filename field, all email clients should follow the rule. But in fact many email clients, including Gmail web UI, don't; some email clients started to use non-ASCII characters in the attachment's filename field before RFC2231 was released, when non-ASCII characters should not have been used in the field. They established their own way to handle non-ASCII characters in the field earlier, and their way is still more dominant than that stipulated in RFC2231.

I don't think TB will be fixed on this issue, because TB does the right thing according to RFC2231. Mr Feng should wait to use Chinese in the attachment's filename until his friends' email clients comply with RFC2231, or at least get able to decode the non-ASCII filename which is encoded based on RFC2231.

To Mr. Feng
Workaround: Use Gmail web mail when you send email with an attachment whose filename is Chinese. You can email from other email accounts other than your Gmail account if you add them in your Gmail web mail's Settings>Accounts.

If you use Simplified Chinese, the workaround will most likely work well. However, you might encounter another problem here. When I sent a Japanese email with an attachment whose filename was Japanese, the email itself was encoded in ISO-2022-JP but the attachment's filename was encoded in BIG5 with B encode. If the characters you use in the filename are the same in shape as used in Japanese or the other Chinese, the filename may not be encoded in your language.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Feng Can, do you agree with comment 2 -- is the problem that your recipients are not using RFC 2331-compatible clients?  If so, please mark this bug as a duplicate of bug 309566.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

No response, duping.